The recent explosion of wireless networks in residential and enterprise environments demands advanced security methods and standards. In a conventional wireless local area network (WLAN), an access point (AP) connects users to other users within a given network through a series of encryption and decryption schemes.
However, these encryption and decryption schemes, which involve initializing various security methods such as Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), Wi-Fi Protected Access Temporal-Key Integrity Protocol (WPA-TKIP), Wi-Fi Protected Access-2 Advanced Encryption Standard (WPA-2 AES), are complicated and confusing to most end users. Even to skilled users the configuration of service set identifier (SSID), channel, symmetric encryption algorithms, pre-shared key mode (PSK), IEEE 802.11 standards, open and shared authentication, passphrases and the like can be time consuming.
These manual routines place a significant burden on end users to obtain advanced knowledge of computer security to guard against unauthorized access. Due to the complexity involved during setup, many wireless home networks are improperly or insecurely installed, leaving end users vulnerable for potential unauthorized access.